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Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#91

Post by cptskippy »

maxxxxx wrote: post #83
cptskippy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's not what Microsoft does at all. The .NET Framework is forward compatible and very rarely breaks compatibility. You can select multiple compilation targets for .NET and have a single piece of code that compiles to multiple frameoworks concurrently. I currently am maintaining a handful of Projects that build Nuget packages compatible with .NET Core, .NET Standard and .NET Framework. If you do have compati…

We aren't talking about .NET in general bit about desktop UI frameworks. If you started with ASP.NET MVC years ago you still are on the main platform that's in full development. With desktop development you have several frameworks that are either in support mode or not fully featured.

GDI, Win32, and XAML are the only ones that come to mind for me, am I missing some? 3 frameworks in 3 decades seems reasonable considering they all still work. The same can't be said for MacOS

If you're referring to Silverlight, that was never a serious desktop UI framework. It was initially targeted as a Flash /Java killer but pivoted to cross platform desktop apps when it became clear that it would never be adopted on Mobile and that Apple/Google were actively trying to kill Flash on the desktop.

That being said, we got XAML from Silverlight and it's not terribly difficult to covert ti a XAML or even UWP app from a Silverlight codebase.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#92

Post by tomc1985 »

013a wrote: post #58

Just 4 months ago they announced they were suspending development of OneNote Win32 in favor of just the UWP version [1] Moreover, they have (had?) an entire multi-year roadmap planned around UWP, including the eventual release of a version of windows which was supposed to substantially reduce day-to-day reliance on Win32 for lower powered devices, codenamed Project Polaris [2], in an attempt to compete with Chromeboo…

This whole headline feels like deja vu... how many times has Microsoft promoted and then abandoned Windows Mobile?

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#93

Post by tomc1985 »

cptskippy wrote: post #81
013a wrote: post #58

Just 4 months ago they announced they were suspending development of OneNote Win32 in favor of just the UWP version [1] Moreover, they have (had?) an entire multi-year roadmap planned around UWP, including the eventual release of a version of windows which was supposed to substantially reduce day-to-day reliance on Win32 for lower powered devices, codenamed Project Polaris [2], in an attempt to compete with Chromeboo…

The UWP version of Office has never really made sense. Office is a massive project and a moving target from a features perspective. It seems like a monumental task to reimplement it from scratch. It makes more sense to gradually rewrite portions of it but that doesn't work well with the annual release model. It does however work with the O365 continuous release model they adapted from Windows 10. Just as they're grad…

They have been "gradually porting" the control panel since Windows 7... with like three different UI frameworks in its Windows 10 version it's one of the best examples of Microsoft's schizophrenic approach to code updates

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#94

Post by maxxxxx »

cptskippy wrote: post #91
maxxxxx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't talking about .NET in general bit about desktop UI frameworks. If you started with ASP.NET MVC years ago you still are on the main platform that's in full development. With desktop development you have several frameworks that are either in support mode or not fully featured.

GDI, Win32, and XAML are the only ones that come to mind for me, am I missing some? 3 frameworks in 3 decades seems reasonable considering they all still work. The same can't be said for MacOS If you're referring to Silverlight, that was never a serious desktop UI framework. It was initially targeted as a Flash /Java killer but pivoted to cross platform desktop apps when it became clear that it would never be adopted…

You are missing Winforms and several XAML frameworks (WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and UWP). Even if you use one of the XAML frameworks porting any app of decent size is really hard to almost impossible.

I think trouble started with .NET. Since then there was a change in direction almost every 2-3 years.

Edit: Forgot WinJS...

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#95

Post by stephengillie »

bhauer wrote: post #78

The headline is misleading. Microsoft is suspending development of the UWP Office applications, which happen to be touch-friendly. However, the headline implies that the remaining Win32 versions do not have a touch-friendly mode, which is false. The Win32 versions can be switched between "mouse" and "touch" modes. In touch mode, the pointing targets are all much larger. But as with most user interfaces on modern Wind…

I've only seen UWP versions of Microsoft products. Really, it's a way of keeping a foot in both mobile and desktop, when mobile-first has been embraced so widely.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#96

Post by intern4tional »

013a wrote: post #58

Just 4 months ago they announced they were suspending development of OneNote Win32 in favor of just the UWP version [1] Moreover, they have (had?) an entire multi-year roadmap planned around UWP, including the eventual release of a version of windows which was supposed to substantially reduce day-to-day reliance on Win32 for lower powered devices, codenamed Project Polaris [2], in an attempt to compete with Chromeboo…

Developing UWP apps is challenging though, it's not a straightforward experience and as a result many people hate it.

I don't know if you've ever had to debug a UWP app but compared to almost anything else it's painful. Exceptions don't propagate properly, and finding errors takes a ton of time. Development is likewise painful with elements of random things being required and the packaging and publishing process a nightmare compared to competitors.

UWP was made for phone and Microsoft then ported it to Core OS, but as a format it is not developer friendly. If you look at new Microsoft under Satya - and their goal of being developer friendly, this move makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised to see UWP and the current store deprecated entirely (as they are honestly failures).

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#97

Post by rblatz »

cptskippy wrote: post #82
maxxxxx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If Microsoft can't even release their marquee apps on it, why should anyone else feel confident in developing on the platform?" That's why I avoid any kind of Windows desktop development. They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. In the Windows environment choice is bad. You only have…

Except that's not what Microsoft does at all. The .NET Framework is forward compatible and very rarely breaks compatibility. You can select multiple compilation targets for .NET and have a single piece of code that compiles to multiple frameoworks concurrently. I currently am maintaining a handful of Projects that build Nuget packages compatible with .NET Core, .NET Standard and .NET Framework. If you do have compati…

Why are you targeting net standard and core in your nuget packages? Targeting standard should be all you need to cover both.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#98

Post by discreditable »

cesarb wrote: post #49
mrweasel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the features I specifically look for in a laptop is "NO TOUCH SCREEN". I really don't understand it. Why would I want touch on a laptop or desktop PC?

Story time. At a previous company, we had an annoying crash bug - it crashed on some of the client's computers, but never on any of ours. Finally the client lent us the personal laptop of one of their workers, which reliably reproduced the crash, and we debugged it while sitting on one of the client's meeting rooms and found the cause. It was a crash deep in the obsolete framework we were using, which manifested when…

This reminds me of an ongoing issue with our org's website. The devs are using an ancient jquery for an image gallery widget. The gallery doesn't respond to mouse clicks on any of our PCs because that jquery version sees touch support and expects you to use only that. All of our devices have touch screens.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#99

Post by berti »

maxsilver wrote: post #50
maxxxxx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support)." You would be suicidial if you based any product you want to sell to business on UWP. Not only doesn't it Win 7 or 8 but I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.

I have found one working enterprise use case. UWP is great if you are exclusively deploying to brand new Windows 10 Embedded devices. (I think this is now called "Windows IoT Core" or something similar). That's what I've been using it for, and that's worked well. It carries a nice side benefit that our sales team all has Windows 10 Pro laptops, and UWP 'just works' there too for sales demos, presentations, and such.…

You need Windows 10 machines to develop for/deploy IoT Core last I checked, so that killed it for us (corp world still holding onto Windows 7).

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#100

Post by mrpippy »

maxsilver wrote: post #33
pjmlp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like everyone else, the biggest difference is that Microsoft keeps the old tech around, while most other companies are willing to loose customers that don't want to move into the new stacks. On one side it is a big reason why they have achieved their market size on the desktop, on the other side we reach this kind of situations where new tech improved tech like Singularity, Midori, Longhorn or now UWP gets thrown int…

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10. Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support). So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ year…

Exactly. One of the biggest reasons why Carbon (and Mac OS X) succeeded is that Carbon apps also ran on OS 8/9. Big apps like Acrobat, Final Cut Pro, Mozilla, and many others were able to use Carbon and run on OS 9 and X.
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